The Queue: Dragotha Dragotha Dragotha

In case you were unaware that I am as ancient and hoary as a sinister black sword that drinks souls, let me introduce y’all to White Plume Mountain, the module that contains throwaway references to stuff that ended up becoming iconic Dungeons and Dragons villains and items. I mean, it’s heavily implied by the art in this module that Elric’s famous black sword Stormbringer ended up in this mountain under the name Blackrazor.

When I was a wee sprog of around 10, my fighter got his hands on that thing, and let me tell you, it was as bad an idea to let me have a sentient evil soul devouring greatsword as it would be for, say, the Prince of Lordaeron. But man, I can still remember the chant we all came up with for places we wanted to go after we were done inside the volcano of weird giant crabs and evil Efreets. Dragotha Dragotha Dragotha.

This is the Queue. We never actually did get to fight Dragotha.

It’s not specifically Wrath related, but remember that entire zones are getting heavily changed — the quests that will exist in Desolace and the Plaguelands, for example, will be heavily modified and in some cases entirely gone. Desolace in particular feels really weird with that sudden burst of living things in the middle of what used to be centaur dominated wastelands.

Also if it feels weird to you to see Horde quest givers standing over the corpses of Alliance NPC’s in Ashenvale? Maybe get used to it.

One step closer to my dream of a Thundercats MMO and the inevitable Silverhawks RTS, I say.

Here comes old man Rossi yelling at clouds.

I’d like it if Wizards of the Coast could work on actual D&D products that were better at exploring their vast range of settings, but to be scrupulously fair to them they’ve done books for Spelljammer, Planescape, and even Dragonlance in the past couple of years.

Us old people will of course remember the Champions of Mystara arcade side scrolling games which were set in Mystara, the original setting for the Dungeons and Dragons box sets (as to be distinguished from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which is something TSR did and no one can explain to me why it was a good idea for one company to have two competing versions of the same RPG that they were selling simultaneously) which was the world that modules like Keep on the Borderlands and Palace of the Silver Princess were originally set it.

And there were of course games like Dark Sun: Shattered Lands that brought the burnt world of Athas to our desktops. Heck, there was even a Dungeons and Dragons mmo in 1996 called Dark Sun Online that ran for four years. So there’s absolutely precedent for using different settings than Faerun.

It’s not that Faerun is bad.

Ed Greenwood’s a smart guy and Wizards has decades of people contributing to the setting. It’s just that I remember the various products set in Mystara or Greyhawk with such fondness. I mean, it’s absolutely fair to say you have be pretty old to be trying to get people to remember White Plume Mountain even through there is a 5th Edition adaptation of it. But since I am pretty old, I’m okay with doing it anyway.

It’s not like we couldn’t have done everything we’ve done with Faerun in the Oerth setting, ultimately. Modules as disparate as The Tomb of Horrors, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, the original Against the Giants series, The Temple of Elemental Evil, the original appearance of the Drow in the Descent into the Depths of the Earth and other D series modules leading up to Queen of the Demonweb Pits showcases how much Faerun lifted from Oerth. I mean, it wasn’t Faerun that showcases a series of interconnected modules leading from the Giants to the Drow across seven modules.

To me it’s a shame that series like the Scourge of the Slave Lords, the module that got me into the idea of running a long form campaign against a series of allied evil jerks, are mostly forgotten.

There has been some content for diehard Eberron fans — remember Dragonshard? I know at least one of you does. And there was Dungeons and Dragons Online which did a fair amount of Eberron content before finally caving and dragging the players to Faerun.

But I don’t disagree that I think Eberron has real potential that hasn’t been tapped, and the original 3rd Edition Eberron book is gorgeous. 

Honestly, I have never seen a game setting that manages to be so thoroughly D&D, yet so perfectly distinct and reminiscent of the stories one could have found in Weird Tales back in the 1920’s. The world of Eberron feels very much like a great place to run stories that involve magic trains, espionage, mystery and action that nowadays we only really see in games like Uncharted or the Tomb Raider series.

Heck, you could practically port the Brendan Fraser Mummy movies to Eberron.

I have no idea but I do have to admit it seems somewhat plausible that they’d both want to do this and actually be putting some time and thought into how best to do this. I mean, the Battle.net launcher already feels like Blizzard trying to put all of its ducks in a row, so to speak, with all of its games accessible from a singular point of entry. I can easily imagine them wanting to make World of Warcraft into a kind of hub for all WoW related games and game modes, so that WoW Classic was accessible from the loading screen of a unified WoW.

Then again, the very fact that Blizzard already has the Bnet launcher does mean that the argument could be made that they’ve already got a service that allows for that level of interconnection and that making a smaller Warcraft only subnet isn’t necessary. Like, we heard you like logins, so we made another hub login so you can login after you logged in.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today, y’all. Have a happy and safe one. I hope to see you all again soon.